Back in Action!

I've been frustrated in my blogging by a bug somewhere between Picasa (the program) and PicasaWeb (the service) and Blogger.com --- all Google properties, so one might hope they would play well together. When I first took up Picasa it was great: I could select some images, click on one button and it would resize them all, upload to Picasaweb, and open a blog post editor. For a year or more, though, this workflow has been broken. I've been searching for alternatives for a long time. Finally yesterday I realized that by replacing the very limited (and limiting!) Picasaweb, I can almost recreate my workflow, using free and Open Source tools! I'll be using mapivi to select images; and simple shell script (that I wrote) to resize the images using ImageMagick; and scp to copy them to a webserver where they'll be accessible to blogger.com. The script will also print out a snippet of HTML that I can cut-n-paste into the blogger.com post editor - this is the only step that's not as shiny as the old Picasa-based workflow but I can live with it. Long live Open Source!

Seven Years

We recently celebrated Son turning Seven. We do these things up right, with usually a whole week of festivities between family, school and friends. The first few images here are from the family dinner party, then we switch over to the friends party at Pump It Up, a party place with lots of giant inflatable stuff to romp around on. Even Son's parents got into the act a little, tho mercifully I omitted those pics. (I'm trying not to be so photo-obsessed lately, but sometimes I can't help myself: I apologize for the quality of the images :-)
p.s. Do you like the new square image format?